First, the start menu is snappy. Browsing through and clicking items is mostly immediate, what a wonderful change from Vista.

The task bar is great, I love the new Desktop preview. When you hover over an item it sets up previews for that group side-by-side, then you can hover over those windows and preview them (it creates placeholders for the other items and shows the live window).

In on day one for using Windows 7 (Build 7000) on my Optiplex GX620. I’ve been getting a lot of “Encountered an assertion failure” all over the place. Since it’s just now in public beta, I was not expecting to find anything on a Google search, which I did not.

I’m not sure if this is a driver issue, yet.

I tracked down one of the biggest issues that would make this happen. On Internet Explorer 8 I had switched my search provider to Google. The errors would popup whenever I would start typing and I tracked it down to Suggestions being enabled. If you click on Manage Search Providers (which would give me an assertion failure), then right click on Google and click Disabled Suggestions, it works pretty well.

I am running almost everything in firefox now though, as Internet Explorer has crashed on me quite a number of times.

I also get assertion errors in other locations, such as changing the location to My Music.

I would give screenshots of the assertion error, but it’s not letting me browse my computer when attempting to upload an image.

I waited until the Beta was released to the public to download and install Windows 7. I had a bit better luck through our Partner technet site than others had downloading it; I got the 2.2GB package in under 90 minutes on the super Comcast highway.

I first attempted to upgrade my existing Vista installation (running on a Dell Optiplex GX620). This failed since I had only 2.2GB of space left on my 20GB C: Partition (Gotta love Vista’s bloatedness). There were a couple of other reasons as well, one being the build that my Vista machine was on (which makes no sense to me).

So I threw my profile into another partition and performed a fresh install. I didn’t time it, but I’d say about an hour later I was ready to use Windows 7.

The display looked a bit funky at first, which was not surprising. I switched to an older Intel driver for Vista for my 82945G Express onboard video card. It helped a bit, but once I switched from the Windows 7 theme to the Landscape theme, the colors were much more appealing and I loved the look.

The sound card, Soundmax Digital Audio, did not install. I grabbed a number of drivers, non of which seemed to work. The frustrating part is that Dell never released any Vista drivers for my machine. Eventually, I found the Soundmax drivers for Vista (Dell Support Site) from another blog. The first time installing failed, but once I rebooted the drivers installed.

First impression: It’s definitely a beta, but I already love it more than Vista, which is not saying much.